Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (14 page)

Overall, men love women’s body parts because they are opposite to their own. Where she has curves, he has angles. Where she is soft, he is hard. So when it comes to physical differences, opposites definitely attract.

A woman who constantly complains about what she perceives are her body’s imperfections turns most men off. For example:

When a man is with a woman, he is usually motivated by her prominent body features and is blinded to her imperfections. If he’s wining and dining her, being romantic and playing the courting game with her, he’s usually so drugged up on dopamine and other hormones that
any
deficiency she may think she has ceases to exist as far as he’s concerned.

Men are very basic creatures when it comes to women. It’s not the size or shape of a woman’s body that turns most men off; it’s the size of her insecurity about her perception of her body that does it. An Australian study conducted in 2008 of females aged thirteen to twenty-eight shows that 86% were
unhappy with the way they looked and would consider all options, including surgery, to change things. Today’s men are tired of hearing about it and simply don’t care. When he’s turned on, her stretch marks are soft and sexy, big thighs become beautiful, and messy hair is perfect, but a woman who complains about her flaws is unattractive to him. It’s that simple.

Elizabeth Hill, associate professor of psychology at the University of Detroit, Mercy, and her associate William Jankowiak asked heterosexual and homosexual men and women to rate the physical attractiveness of a series of images of people. They found that both homosexual and heterosexual men gave almost identical results in their preferences for youth and physical appearance of potential mates. Heterosexual and homosexual women, however, placed little importance on youth in ranking their attractiveness. In their analysis of magazine advertisements for partners, Hill and Jankowiak found that heterosexual men and women and homosexual men were identical in that exactly one in three asked for a photograph of prospective partners, whereas only one in eight lesbians wanted one. When it came to offering physical assets in the ads, such as weight, height, eye color, build, and fitness, three out of four homosexual and heterosexual men mentioned them; one in five heterosexual women offered them. Only one in fourteen homosexual women offered any.

In another study, Blumstein and Schwartz studied 12,000 couples, including 969 gay male couples and 788 gay female couples, and found that even in permanent relationships these criteria were still consistent. They found that 57% of gay men and 59% of heterosexual men felt it was important for their partner to look sexy, compared to 35% of lesbians and 31% of heterosexual women. The conclusion here is that both hetero-and
homosexual males have the same mating preferences; all that differs is the sex of the partner.

Women’s chastity and faithfulness are directly related to their dependence on a man’s resources. In countries where governments provide solid welfare programs for deserted women, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden, women are less dependent on men’s resources because the government has, in effect, taken over that role—that is, it provides the resources. This is one of the main reasons premarital and extramarital sex rates are soaring in high-welfare countries and also explains why extramarital sex is so low in countries that provide little or no welfare system, such as China and India. In those places, men have the resources and women don’t want to lose them.

Almost every study in the last sixty years into what men want reaches the same conclusion that painters, poets, and writers have reached over the past 6,000 years—a woman’s appearance and body and what she can do with it are more attractive to men than her intelligence or assets. And this is despite the
politically correct times we live in. The twenty-first century man looks for the same immediate things in a woman that his forefathers wanted—her perceived ability to carry his genes successfully and to nurture him and his offspring. In a short-term mate, he looks for health, youth, and availability. For a long-term partner, however, he prioritizes personality, humor, intelligence, and a nurturing attitude.

Unfortunately, in a typical week, an average man is exposed to over 500 images of “perfect” women in magazines and newspapers, on billboards and television. Most of these images are the result of makeup and technology, like airbrushing, computer artwork, and special lighting effects. Rarely do they show a real person.

Finally, when it comes to sex, what do men really want? The answer is, everything. Any time, any place, and under almost any conditions. A woman can find a partner for sex at any time because she owns the egg. Men, however, evolved having to hunt for sex and to compete with other males for it, and they were propelled by their goal of spreading their genes by reproducing with as many females as possible. This is why men became sexual opportunists. Today’s woman still needs a reason for having sex; today’s man still just needs a place. Now, let’s look at what men and women want from casual sex and one-night stands.

Saturday night, 11.30 P.M., at a cocktail bar. (Turn image upside down.)

P
icture this scene. You are walking along the street when an attractive person approaches you and asks if you would have sex with them right now in their minibus, which is parked in a nearby private car park. If you’re like 99.2% of women, your immediate answer would be “no.” But if you’re like three out of four men, your answer would be “yes.” This chapter is about why people have casual sex and one-night stands.

In 1982, just before the onset of the AIDS crisis, researchers Dr. Clark and Dr. Hatfield carried out an experiment on an American college campus. A reasonably attractive member of the opposite sex would approach a student and say that they had noticed them around and found them very attractive. They would then ask one of three questions:

Although 76% of males agreed to have sex with the attractive female, almost none of the females agreed to have sex with the male, though about half agreed to go on a date with him. Dr. Clark repeated the study in 1989 to see what impact the AIDS crisis had had on people’s willingness to engage in casual sex. Men in the post-AIDS world were just as eager for casual sex with total strangers, whereas women remained just as reluctant, even though about half were still willing to go on a date with a stranger.

We can assume that these women—undergraduates at Florida State during the peak of the sexual revolution—had unrestricted attitudes toward casual sex; however, a total stranger, regardless of his good looks, simply did not pass the initial threshold for a woman to consider as a mate. The study also made it clear that for most men, a total stranger is well above the threshold to meet his casual-mate selection criteria—with 76% of the men saying “yes” to an offer from an attractive woman they had never met before. This makes perfect sense as these men were operating from their short-term partner list and were immediately fired up on hormones.

This experiment has been repeated many times since 1989 with almost unchanged results. The more attractive the person who was making the offer was, the more likely women were to agree to a date, but they still resisted agreeing to have sex with him. For men, the more attractive the person was, the greater the likelihood they would agree to sex. Whereas women were generally puzzled, surprised, or even offended by this spontaneous proposal, most men were excited and flattered by it.

In another experiment, 99 undergraduates at an American university completed a confidential survey about their attitudes toward sexual intimacy. Among other findings, men
were significantly more likely than women to report that they were willing to:

1. Have sex with someone they had known for three hours.
   

2. Have sex with two different people within a six-hour period.
   

3. Have sex with someone they did not love.
   

4. Have sex with someone with whom they did not have a good relationship.
   

This survey highlights how our immediate responses to sexual opportunities appear to have remained unchanged in thousands of years.

There are many different definitions of what casual sex is. Here are some terms you might have heard: booty call, hook-up, anonymous sex, friend with benefits, fuck buddy, one-night stand, and chance encounter. Call it what you like, it’s all about one-off sexual encounters with strangers. It can also be an agreement between two people to have casual sex on a regular basis.

Initially, casual sex appears to involve people who focus specifically on the physical satisfaction of sex rather than the emotional side. Most people believe that casual sex lacks the emotional ties that come with relationships, and sex without any commitment or ties sounds very appealing to men, but as you will discover, this is not the case for women. The behavior of some of today’s women gives the illusion that their casual-sex motives are similar to men’s, but they aren’t. The only
times a woman feels compelled to have casual sex for physical-gratification reasons are when she has a high testosterone level (and this applies to less than 20% of women) or when she is ovulating and her body is searching for the right male with the best genes. Even under these two circumstances, she will still have base-level criteria for having sex with a stranger. To desire only physical sex you need to be high on testosterone, and most women rarely are. Men always are. Women have deeper motives. We’ll examine these motives in more detail a little later.

In 2008, Dr. David Schmitt of Bradley University, Illinois, surveyed 14,000 people in forty-eight countries who filled in questionnaires about casual sex, how many people they expected to have sex with over the next five years, and how comfortable they were with the idea of casual sex. The results were turned into an index of “sociosexuality”—a measure of how sexually liberal people are in thought and behavior. African tribes were not included, even though they are believed to be the world’s most promiscuous people. In an index measuring one-night stands, numbers of partners, and attitudes to sex, Finland was ranked as the most promiscuous country, closely followed by Sweden.